It is the private sector with thousands of industries in the sick list that is the real problem.
KARACHI: This refers to Kamal Siddiqi’s article “Sell and be damned” (January 13) on the privatisation proposal of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA). The employee-aircraft ratio problem is the easiest to correct by increasing the number of aircraft, which is long overdue. While the salary of employees accounts for less than 18 per cent of total expenses (25 per cent in other airlines), there are other important factors causing losses, none of which are employee related.
Fuel costs have shot up to 57 per cent of expenditure (45 per cent in other airlines) due to wrong selection of aircraft. Poor route and fleet planning, shortage of aircraft, ignoring profitable routes, non-utilisation of earning sectors, like engineering, ground handling, cargo, wholesale exit of experienced professionals to golden handshake schemes, non-provision of instrumentation at airports that results in a long turnaround on take-off, huge inventory of needless items and many other such factors are contributing to PIA’s losses.
It does not take a genius to correct these problems. There are sensible solutions to each and every one of them. In fact, the employees have repeatedly proposed sensible solutions, which have always been ignored. Even the recommendations of the special committee established for turning PIA around have not been implemented.
While PPP-bashing remains the favourite hobby of the elite, we must understand that it was the public sector that established and efficiently ran PIA and other units that are being privatised. In fact, the whole industrialisation of the country owes a lot to public sector organisations, like the PIDC. It is the private sector with thousands of industries in the sick list that is the real problem. The government hopes to raise Rs1 trillion through the sale of national assets. This amount is less than what the corporate sector evades in taxes every year.
The factual situation is that senior officials managing large public sector organisations like PIA, PASMIC, etc. have deliberately caused huge losses in order to strengthen the case for their privatisation. The workers, on the other hand, want these concerns to run profitably and grow, since it is a matter of their own livelihood.
The Privatisation Commission insists that privatisation of the units being privatised had been approved by the Council of Common Interests (CCI). At the same time, the Commission avoids giving the date of the CCI decision or the exact wordings of the decision. Maybe I am wrong, but I do not recall any decision of the CCI in this respect after the Eighteenth Amendment when the composition, functions and procedures of the CCI were greatly altered during the five years of the PPP government.
Taj Haider
General Secretary
PPP Sindh
Published in The Express Tribune, January 17th, 2014.
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